Fictional dialogue constitutes the link that joins the literary text with the multimodal text and it is the appropriate place for evoking orality, conferring authenticity and credibility to the narrated plot and for giving a voice to the fictitious characters. In order to achieve this mimesis of the spoken language, also called "feigned orality", the author of a fictional text selects specific features, considered typical of the language of the communicative immediateness although they may also include stereotypical elements, depending on the historical language and the culture in question as well as on the current literary conventions in every period.

Since some of the resources used to evoke orality are general, that is to say, they are observed in the situation of communicative immediateness of a great number of languages (universal features), and some of them are historical-idiomatic characteristics of the source language, recreating them in the target language (or languages) constitutes a real challenge for the translator.

On the basis of an intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic approach, the project intends to investigate a) the selected features and their functions in fictional dialogue; b) the changes which take place during translation ("translation shifts"), and the translation strategies applied in the transfer of orality; c) the metalinguistic reflections of the authors and translators of fictional texts.